As we start off this New Year, how about including a resolution to improve application delivery? In Best Practices for Application Delivery in Virtualized Networks – Part I , we covered key application delivery challenges that have come up due to the complexities of managing the many types of applications that enterprises use today, and further complicated by data center consolidation and virtualization. We then covered some best practices, courtesy of Dr. Jim Metzler’s 2011 Application Service Delivery Handbook, which recommended taking a lifecycle approach to planning and managing application performance.

A key step to the lifecycle approach is to implement network and application optimization tools, such as WAN Optimization solutions and Application Delivery Controllers, including server load balancers. Of course, these solutions are not new to the market and already address many of the needs that exist with delivering enterprise applications in virtualized data centers – namely, the need to ensure network reliability, availability and security for users accessing these applications. In this post, we will discuss a recent study by IDC, where IT decision makers across Europe and the US spoke out about their strategies for using server load balancers to deal with emerging challenges.

. What important attributes do you look for in your server load balancers?

Today I want to bring up DCI use case that I’ve been thinking about: capacity expansion. As you know, the purpose of DCI is to connect two or more Data Centers together so that they share resources and deliver services. The capacity expansion use case is when you have temporary traffic bursts, cloud bursts, either planned or unplanned, maintenance windows, migrations or really any temporary service event that requires additional service capacity.

To start addressing the challenge of meeting these planned and unplanned cloud burst and capacity expansion requirements, check out the new ACE + OTV feature called Dynamic Workload Scaling announced recently.

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